Did you, or anyone you know, get married at Wymondham Abbey in the 1960s? In those old wedding photos, is there a chimney sweep standing next to the bride and groom? If you said “yes” to these two questions, then that sweep may be Ted!
Ted’s father, George Geoffrey Barham, was a jack of many trades, and this included running a chimney cleaning business that he passed on to Ted in the mid-1950s.
Ted would cycle as far as East Harling to get to the 3-storey houses of his customers and then used his bike light to look for blockages. He would then climb the stairs to the loft or attic as chimney problems were usually nearer the top.
Sometimes he found a sparrow’s nest with unhatched eggs on the chimney ledge, and this was always safely returned to Nature. Any excess soot collected from his washing-up bowl in the fireplace was scattered in the customer’s garden (nothing was wasted in those days). Ted recalls that Walter Barber was one of his best customers.
One day, while working on a job in Wicklewood, he met a courting couple, Paul and Susan, and they hired him to attend their wedding, as it was considered good luck to have a chimney sweep at the ceremony. Paul was rich: he was the son of a Norwich businessman and had already booked a horse and a carriage for the big day, so Ted’s services were affordable.
Ted showed up at the church wearing his sweep’s boiler suit and brandishing his cleaning brushes. He shook hands with both the bride and the groom and gave them turns at handling the broom, while the photographer snapped away; there were tissues on hand for cleaning themselves up afterwards.
Ted also said, “Happy Wedding Day, and may you have many years together!” This meant that the couple had been blessed by both Ted and Reverend James Thomas in the Abbey.
Ted must have made a great impression, as he was invited to preside over a few more weddings that summer, and he continued to clean local chimneys until the end of the sixties. As Dick Van Dyke sang in Mary Poppins, “a sweep is as lucky as lucky can be!”
